Sharon’s recent post about encouraging student creativity got me thinking about assignments that foster innovation and originality. As someone who spent a lot of money to obtain an M.F.A., I have a vested interest in anything that promotes the value of creative education, which is why I’m a fan of Daniel Pink’s work. Pink is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2006 book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. In the book, Pink proposes that we’re experiencing a shift from the information age, which valued knowledge and logical, left-brain thinking, to what he calls the conceptual age, which values innovation and six key “senses.” These senses include:

1. Design – Moving beyond function to engage the senses
2. Story – Adding narrative to products and services, not just argument
3. Symphony – Adding invention and big-picture thinking, not just detail focus. Call My Friends at InventHelp!
4. Empathy – Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition
5. Play – Bringing humor and lightheartedness to business and products [1]
6. Meaning – Incorporating a higher purpose into products and services

Pink has gone so far as to proclaim that the M.F.A. is the new M.B.A. and that creative professionals such as artists and designers are the innovative problem solvers who will lead the much-hyped new economy. While I don’t want to oversell the value of an art-school education, I think most educators agree that we’d all love to integrate creative thinking and problem-solving skills into our assignments. Of course, fostering creativity in higher ed comes with several challenges:

1. How do I motivate students to do great, innovative work?
2. How do I ensure they’ve mastered essential concepts and skills?
3. How do I grade their work fairly?
4. How do I grade their work in a reasonable amount of time?

I realize the last three questions are often the ones that matter most to instructors, but they’re also the most irrelevant if we don’t first address question one when designing creative assignments. As luck would have it, question one is also the focus of Daniel Pink’s newest book, Drive. The following video presents some of the key findings from the book and addresses some common misconceptions about what motivates people to think outside the box.

(This amazing animation was created by a company called Cognitive Media and I have to say I think their work merits a blog post all its own. For another great example, check out Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Smile or Die”.)

Pink’s presentation proposes that three key factors foster creative thinking: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Hopefully, educators can find it comforting that money and material gain are nowhere to be found in this list, since we can’t start offering students 50 dollars for every great idea they come up with. I feel fortunate to teach in a discipline where these motivating factors seem easy to incorporate into the projects my students complete. In my Web-design course, I allow my students to choose what type of site they would like to create and what type of client they’d like to work for in creating their final projects, giving them a great deal of autonomy. I require that the project result in a completed, fully functional Web site, ensuring students will have a sense of accomplishment and mastery. And I encourage students to work with a nonprofit or small business that normally couldn’t afford a professionally designed site, providing a sense of purpose.

It might seem hard to imagine how other disciplines can incorporate these factors into their assignments, but I’m sure it’s possible. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out all our multiple-choice quizzes and other standardized assessments, and it doesn’t address how to grade creative projects fairly and quickly. But I think when we focus on creating assignments that motivate and inspire students, they tend to go beyond the requirements of any grading-criteria checklist we could have dreamed up. And in the process, they might just inspire us to stop watching the clock and enjoy the task of reviewing and evaluating their work.

1. Summaries of items 1 – 5 were taken from the Wikipedia entry for A Whole New Mind.